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From Covert to Overt: UK Government and Businesses Seek to Unleash Facial Recognition Technologies Across Urban Landscape

August 6, 2023

From Covert to Overt: UK Government and Businesses Seek to Unleash Facial Recognition Technologies Across Urban Landscape

The Home Office is encouraging police forces across the country to make use of live facial recognition technologies for routine law enforcement. Retailers are also embracing the technology to monitor their customers. 

It increasingly seems that the UK decoupled from the European Union, its rules and regulations, only for its government to take the country in a progressively more authoritarian direction. This is, of course, a generalised trend among ostensibly “liberal democracies” just about everywhere, including EU Member States, as they increasingly adopt the trappings and tactics of more authoritarian regimes, such as restricting free speech, cancelling people and weakening the rule of law. But the UK is most definitely at the leading edge of this trend. A case in point is the Home Office’s naked enthusiasm for biometric surveillance and control technologies.

This week, for example, The Guardian revealed that the Minister for Policing Chris Philip and other senior figures of the Home Office had held a closed-door meeting with Simon Gordon, the founder of Facewatch, a leading facial recognition retail security company, in March. The main outcome of the meeting was that the government would lobby the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) on the benefits of using live facial recognition (LFR) technologies in retail settings. LFR involves hooking up facial recognition cameras to databases containing photos of people. Images from the cameras can then be screened against those photos to see if they match.

The lobbying effort was apparently successful. Just weeks after reaching out to the ICO, the ICO sent a letter to Facewatch affirming that the company “has a legitimate purpose for using people’s information for the detection and prevention of crime” and that its services broadly comply with UK Data Protection laws, which the Sunak government and UK intelligence agencies are trying to gut. ..

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LEAKED HOME OFFICE CALL Reveals Government Wants Economy to ‘Continue Running’ As ‘We Will All Get’ COVID-19 Anyway

April 14, 2020

LEAKED HOME OFFICE CALL Reveals Government Wants Economy to ‘Continue Running’ As ‘We Will All Get’ COVID-19 Anyway 

Nafeez Ahmed reports on Home Office private advice suggesting a ‘zombie herd immunity’ policy risking hundreds of thousands of deaths. 

Leaked recordings of a Home Office conference call on Tuesday, exclusively obtained by Byline Times, reveal that the Government has all but given up in its fight against the Coronavirus and is intent on simply finding “a method of managing it within the population”.

The recordings show Home Office Deputy Science Advisor Rupert Shute stating repeatedly that the Government believes “we will all get” COVID-19 eventually. The call further implied that the Government now considers hundreds of thousands of deaths unavoidable over a long-term period consisting of multiple peaks of the disease.

Premature Defeatism

While urging the importance of reducing the burden on the NHS by staying at home, Shute downplayed the risk of people contracting the virus at work.

He said: “It’s perfectly okay to carry on around your business. And it’s vitally important that you do as there’s a whole bunch of supply chains and the economy that needs to continue running… So carrying on with your normal work is not putting you in harms way anymore so than staying at home or going out shopping. So I keep coming back to this point that we are all going to get this at some point. And it’s about making sure that we have a really strong NHS there to support us when we do get sick.”

The policy being communicated by the Home Office privately among Government staffers is at odds with Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s statement at a press conference three weeks ago that the next 12 weeks could “turn the tide of this disease”.

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Crash of Outsourcing Giant with 70,000 Employees Globally Sparks New Panic

February 3, 2018

Crash of Outsourcing Giant with 70,000 Employees Globally Sparks New Panic

“Not another Carillion,” says UK government to soothe frazzled nerves, as entire industry is teetering.

Since the sudden downfall of the British infrastructure giant Carillion two weeks ago, investors’ nerves in London are frayed. And short-sellers, scanning the horizon for their next prey, seem to have found it.

Its name is Capita. It is one of the UK government’s biggest outsourcing firms with contracts to provide services to government entities, such as NHS cleaning, school dinners, and prison maintenance. It has 70,000 employees in the UK, Europe, South Africa, and India.

On Wednesday, its shares tumbled 47.5% to a 15-year low after its new CEO, Jon Lewis, slashed profit forecasts, announced plans to tap the capital market for £700 million, and suspended a dividend that was worth more than £200 million to shareholders last year.

On Thursday, the rout continued , with shares dropping a further 13%. On Friday, shares bounced off a tiny 2.3% to close at 162.3 pence, down 77% from June 2017 and down 88% from July 2015.

In a desperate bid to calm market nerves at the height of Wednesday’s rout, the UK government released a statement insisting that Capita was “not another Carillion.”

But whatever the government might say, there is a striking resemblance between the two companies:

Like Carillion, Capita is massively dependent on government contracts. In the last two years alone it was awarded 226 public sector contracts — 10 times more than Carillion — making it the biggest supplier of local government services in the country, according to public sector data provider Tussel.

Like Carillion, Capita is massively in debt, with an estimated £1.1 billion of funds outstanding. And like Carillion, it’s been exceptionally generous with its dividend policy in recent years. So did it, as Carillion is accused of doing, borrow money and sell-off assets in order to pay its dividends, in direct contravention of UK law?

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The “Fake News” Crusade to “Protect” You from Free Speech

February 2, 2018

The “Fake News” Crusade to “Protect” You from Free Speech

  • Even if judgements against some of these websites might be overturned in courts, doing so is clearly an enormous financial burden, as the would-be censors doubtless know. But what a handy way not to have one’s policies questioned — especially, one assumes, during elections.
  • Attempts to censor “competing narratives” is probably just a tip-off that certain individuals are afraid their political ideas will be unable to withstand the questions asked or the test of time.
  • “If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society.” — Natan Sharansky, The Case for Democracy.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,” George Orwell wrote in his ant-totalitarian novel, 1984. He would probably have frowned upon the latest UK Government blueprint to create a regulatory agency that will ultimately strangle freedom of expression.

Scrutiny against “Fake News,” is undoubtedly a positive development. It means that at least people are questioning the news they are consuming. Yes, it is a problem that so much disinformation and misinformation exists. It is, however, a far bigger problem if they do not. The public’s resolve should be that disinformation is not combated by a regulatory body controlled by Government. Individual arguments, with evidence, is what belongs in a democracy, which can only survive if it is a marketplace of ideas.

If having a Government body decide what can and cannot be published – thereby creating a culture of both official censorship and self-censorship — is not enough to concern you, the briefest glance at what this newly created British body would consider “Fake News” should send you running into the street.

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Implementing the Helm Review on the Cost of UK Energy

November 17, 2017

Implementing the Helm Review on the Cost of UK Energy

The UK Government has made a call for evidence on the Helm Review published on 25th October 2017. At the time the review was published I chose not to share my opinions on the consequences of implementing Helm’s proposals since I believe these may be far reaching and have a large negative impact on UK citizens, businesses and the economy. At the time I did not want to upset the apple cart since I also believe Helm offers the best path forward for so long as the UK Government remains committed to its 2008 Climate Change Act (CCA).  Helm’s proposals will deliver sharply higher energy and electricity prices, carbon reduction and hopefully a functioning energy and electricity system and market. Muddling along as now will also deliver sharply higher prices with no guarantee of carbon reduction and the near certainty of a broken and dysfunctional energy system.

[Inset image is the Coire Glas pumped storage hydro scheme in Scotland, designed to store surplus wind power and provide 30GWh of storage. Still empty after all those years, Coire Glas stands as testimony to renewable fantasy colliding with thermodynamic and economic reality.]

Energy is More than Electricity

Helm’s review was on the cost of UK energy, which encompasses oil, gas, coal, nuclear and renewables. While his review is focussed on electricity he does make sufficient reference to these other energy sources to make clear that his recommendations apply to the whole energy system.

[Inset image is the Coire Glas pumped storage hydro scheme in Scotland, designed to store surplus wind power and provide 30GWh of storage. Still empty after all those years, Coire Glas stands as testimony to renewable fantasy colliding with thermodynamic and economic reality.]

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Amnesty International Responds to UK Government Surveillance

July 3, 2015

Amnesty International Responds to UK Government SurveillanceFeatured photo - Amnesty International Responds to U.K. Government Surveillance

A British tribunal admitted on Wednesday that the U.K. government had spied on Amnesty International and illegally retained some of its communications. Sherif Elsayed-Ali, deputy director of global issues for Amnesty International in London, responds:

Just after 4 p.m. yesterday, Amnesty International received an email from the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), which hears cases related to U.K. intelligence agencies. The message was brief: There had been a mistake in the tribunal’s judgment 10 days earlier in a case brought by 10 human rights organizations against the U.K.’s mass surveillance programs. Contrary to the finding in the original ruling, our communications at Amnesty International had, in fact, been under illegal surveillance by GCHQ, the U.K.’s signals intelligence agency.

Incredibly, the initial judgment had named the wrong organization — the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights — and it took 10 days to correct the mix-up. The news brought an unexpected and bizarre sense of relief: We strongly suspected that we were being spied on by GCHQ, but having it confirmed in court meant we weren’t just being paranoid.

Of course, GCHQ and likely its U.S. counterpart, the NSA, spy on a range of organizations besides Amnesty. The same IPT judgment revealed GCHQ’s unlawful surveillance of the South African Legal Resources Centre. Leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden showed that GCHQ and the NSA have spied on Doctors of the World and UNICEF. And the fact that the IPT did not find in favor of the eight other organizations bringing the case does not necessarily mean their communications were left untouched — perhaps they were intercepted, but the tribunal considered it had been done legally.

This whole process brings to light the problem with the so-called “oversight” of U.K. surveillance programs. In the U.K., a government minister, not a judge, issues surveillance warrants; from the very start the executive branch of government authorizes its own spying.

 

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